Report pages 26–31: 108 claims on pp. 26–31 (fact 66, statement 25, evidence 7, conclusion 1, conjecture 7, definition 2).
In this chapter, we provide an overview of the BTAM landscape in K–12 public schools across the country using data from the 1,746 principals who completed our survey on behalf of their schools.
We first use our survey results to investigate how many schools nationally had BTAM programs in place as of the 2024–2025 school year
We then examine what types of schools are likely to have BTAM programs and to what extent the prevalence of BTAM programs today is at all related to what the policy context looked like in 2019.
Specifically, we explore any potential differences in schools’ implementation of BTAM today based on whether their states required, encouraged, or did not address BTAM in the 2019 policy.
Figure 2.1 displays the national landscape of BTAM programs in K–12 schools, using 100 boxes to represent the population of U.S. public schools.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
As shown and according to the principals who took our survey, virtually all public schools (97 percent) engaged in BTAM in some capacity during the 2024–2025 school year.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
Eighty-two percent of public schools have a team that they explicitly call a BTAM team (for which we use the term official BTAM team).
This translates to more than 70,000 schools across the United States with BTAM teams.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
This includes 25 percent of schools that have an official BTAM team housed at the school level, 13 percent of schools that only have a school district–level BTAM team, and 43 percent of schools that have both school- and district-level teams.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
Another 14 percent of schools have a team that was not formally identified as a BTAM team but was functionally similar to such teams in that it “makes decisions regarding serious student behavioral concerns” (those are represented by the light purple boxes in Figure 2.1).
These are typically school-based teams that make decisions in cases of serious student behavioral concerns; they could be a team associated with a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) or positive behavioral intervention system (PBIS) or some other team referred to by another name.
were also served by BTAM teams that were managed by organizations or government entities external to the school or district.
For example, in some areas, teams managed by a local community or health care organization carry out BTAM for youth and adults referred to them through different pathways.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
Nine percent of schools reported working with an
Why inferred The sentence crosses a page break: this quote is the page 26 part and the sentence continues on page 27. Full sentence (pages 26–27): “Nine percent of schools reported working with an external BTAM team, as represented by the superimposed orange box in Figure 2.1.”
Some schools maintain programs that are not explicitly called BTAM but are functionally similar BTAM programs.
We initially present data that cover both types of programs but will later narrow to discuss only those programs that our respondents specifically identified as BTAM.
We define BTAM-like team as a school-based team that makes decisions regarding serious student behavioral concerns but is not formally referred to as a BTAM team.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
Official BTAM team | 82
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
School-level team only | 25
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
District-level team only | 13
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
Teams located at both levels | 43
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
Alternative team performing BTAM functions | 14
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
No BTAM team | 3
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
Supported by BTAM team external to school district | 9
“During this school year (2024–2025), does your school or school district have a behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) team or any other formal group of persons tasked with identifying and assessing students who might be at risk for violent or harmful behavior (toward themselves or others)?”
“Is the BTAM team(s) housed at the school or district level, or both?”
“Some schools are served by BTAM teams external to a school or district. These teams may be managed by a community organization; a local, county, state, or federal government entity; a law enforcement agency; or other organizations. Is your school served by an outside BTAM team?”
“Does your school have a school-based team that makes decisions regarding serious student behavioral concerns that is not referred to as a behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) team? This could be a team associated with a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) or positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) that makes decisions about individualized interventions for serious behavioral concerns” (N = 1,746)
For principals who responded to the above items with “Don’t know,” we counted their school as a “no.”
One hundred boxes are used to represent the U.S. population of public schools.
Percentages and shading may not align or sum to 100 because of rounding.
We asked principals to consider teams managed by a community organization; a local, county, state, or federal government entity; a law enforcement agency; or other organizations.
Because these external BTAM teams are not a primary focus of this report, we have limited information available about them and how schools engage with them.
Furthermore, most principals noted they were only “somewhat familiar” with the operation and processes of these outside BTAM teams.
As shown in Figure 1.1, schools’ use of BTAM has increased over time.
Although individual schools may adopt new school safety approaches individually or at the district level, the state policy context—that is, whether schools are subject to legal requirements or receive incentives to adopt BTAM—likely affects the extent to which and how rapidly schools implement new practices.
States that mandate BTAM in schools, for example, might fund their state-level school agencies to provide BTAM-specific training to schools at no cost, or publish guidelines to aid implementation.
Some states took definitive steps to push their schools to implement BTAM relatively early (e.g., Virginia’s law relating to BTAM was enacted in 2013), while others have established legislative mandates more recently (e.g., Florida, New Jersey).
Other states took steps to encourage adoption, for example, by publishing guidance and recommendations without a legislative mandate
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
As shown in Figure 2.1, 9 percent of schools (or roughly 8,000 schools across the United States) work with an external BTAM team.
Sample (N = 174) · Appendix A table base (respondents answering the table question; see note for tables)
Of those schools supported by external teams, the vast majority (89 percent) said these were community- or county-level teams that respond to cases in local schools and in the broader community.
Sample (N = 174) · Appendix A table base (respondents answering the table question; see note for tables)
Only 5 percent of schools received support from a state-level team, and only 2 percent engaged with a team managed by a federal agency (such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]) about specific cases.
Sample (N = 122) · Appendix A table base (respondents answering the table question; see note for tables)
Most schools that worked with such teams (55 percent) said an outside BTAM team only becomes involved in a case when the school specifically seeks out its assistance.
Sample (N = 122) · Appendix A table base (respondents answering the table question; see note for tables)
Conversely, a handful (8 percent) reported that the only time their school engages with an outside BTAM team is when the external team approaches the school about a specific threat or tip received that is relevant to the school.
The remaining schools provided mixed responses in terms of who initiates the engagement—the school or the external team.
The principals we surveyed reported a mix of experiences working with these external teams.
Sample (N = 122) · Appendix A table base (respondents answering the table question; see note for tables)
Thirty-eight percent said outside BTAM teams have access to more or different information than the school or district does, including ready access to law enforcement data and other sources—a potential benefit.
Another potential benefit of external teams, which slightly more than half of schools that had engaged with these teams experienced, is access to a broader variety of service providers or providers with greater capacity to deliver intervention programming relative to what the school is able to provide.
Sample (N = 122) · Appendix A table base (respondents answering the table question; see note for tables)
One-quarter (25 percent) of these respondents said that external teams do not know as much about school environments and/or youth populations relative to school-based stakeholders, which can be problematic when it comes to assessing the level of threat posed by student behavior.
Sample (N = 122) · Appendix A table base (respondents answering the table question; see note for tables)
Similarly, 20 percent of principals noted that outside teams do not know as much about the specific school community context.
High school principals, in particular, seemed more skeptical about the usefulness of these external teams.
Sample (column N undeterminable) · High school principals served by an external BTAM team
They were more likely than their elementary and middle school counterparts to believe that external teams do not know much about school environments and/or youth populations (48 percent said this) and also less likely than middle school principals to believe that these teams have access to a broader variety of service providers.
Still other states do not provide any guidance and leave these decisions to the individual school or school district.
Although we do not expect state policy context to be the primary determinant of schools’ decisions about which safety measures to implement (see Chapter 7 for a discussion of the primary drivers for initial BTAM implementation in schools), encouraging the use of BTAM or providing other supports, such as funding to state-level school safety agencies specifically for BTAM could promote adoption or influence how schools form BTAM teams and scope their responsibilities.
As a result, schools in states with early BTAM-specific legislation or in states that encouraged BTAM earlier than others might be further along today in refining their practices for their specific school context.
we drew on a systematic analysis of state-level laws and policies related to threat assessment and completed by Child Trends and NASBE
Some schools provided information on the potential drawbacks of working with external teams.
The Child Trends and NASBE analysis (2021) divided states into three categories: (1) states that mandated behavioral threat assessment in K–12 schools through legislation or specific state policy in 2019; (2) states that encouraged the implementation of behavioral threat assessment in K–12 schools or addressed it via non-codified policy in 2019; and (3) states that made no mention of behavioral threat assessment in 2019.
We explored to what extent the current (as of this writing) BTAM landscape in schools differed across these three early state policy contexts.
Figure 2.2 displays the existing landscape of BTAM program adoption in schools based on our survey data, again using 100 boxes to represent the population of public schools in each state policy context.
The three breakdowns demonstrate that BTAM is very common in schools across all 2019 state policy contexts.
Very few schools in any state policy context do not engage in BTAM at all.
However, there are marginal differences in specific elements of BTAM adoption across these contexts, namely in the types of teams serving schools.
schools in these states are more likely than their counterparts in other policy contexts to use a BTAM-like team to perform threat assessment and management functions (e.g., an MTSS or PBIS team).
Sample (N = 423 | 481 | 842 by column) · State-policy groups in column order: other states, encouraged BTAM use only, early legislation states
More specifically, 90 percent of schools in early legislation states have an official BTAM team today, compared with 77 percent of schools in states that only encouraged the practice in 2019 and 73 percent of schools in states where there was no mention of BTAM in state policy in 2019.
Furthermore, schools in early legislation states are more likely today than those in states where BTAM was not addressed in 2019 to have teams at both the school and district levels.
We also investigated the prevalence of BTAM teams (including BTAM-like teams) across different school demographics, including school level, locale, poverty level, student racial/ethnic composition, and student enrollment size.
As shown in Figure 2.3, BTAM teams were common across all school types.
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School enrollment-size subgroups (small, large)
Principals of large schools (those serving 450 students or more) were slightly more likely than their counterparts in small schools to report having official BTAM teams (85 percent versus 79 percent, respectively).
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School-locale subgroups (urban, suburban, rural)
BTAM teams may also be slightly less common in rural settings: 78 percent of rural schools reported having official BTAM teams compared with 84 percent of suburban schools and 86 percent of urban schools.
The 2019 compilation of law and policy was the most up-to-date source of comprehensive information on BTAM requirements nationally at the time of survey sampling and planning
Note that the authors of this study were focused on threat assessment, which is a somewhat broader category than behavioral threat assessment and management as currently defined.
For example, a state might be categorized by these authors as having a law, regulation, or policy requiring threat assessment even if the requirement did not involve that threat assessment being done by a multidisciplinary team (which is core to virtually all framings of behavioral threat assessment).
Note that some of these states that had neither legislation nor encouraged BTAM as of 2019 have passed BTAM legislation as of this report’s publication.
Federal data on school safety measures from the 2021–2022 school year also show that schools located in rural locales were less likely to have threat assessment teams, compared with schools located in city, suburban, and town locales (Burr et al., 2024).
During that school year, schools located in urban areas were also most likely to have threat assessment teams.
However, we do note some minor differences.
Sample (N = 423 | 481 | 842 by column) · State-policy groups in column order: other states, encouraged BTAM use only, early legislation states
Official BTAM team | 73 | 77 | 90
Sample (N = 423 | 481 | 842 by column) · State-policy groups in column order: other states, encouraged BTAM use only, early legislation states
School-level team only | 24 | 20 | 29
Sample (N = 423 | 481 | 842 by column) · State-policy groups in column order: other states, encouraged BTAM use only, early legislation states
District-level team only | 16 | 18 | 10
Sample (N = 423 | 481 | 842 by column) · State-policy groups in column order: other states, encouraged BTAM use only, early legislation states
Teams located at both levels | 33 | 39 | 50
Sample (N = 423 | 481 | 842 by column) · State-policy groups in column order: other states, encouraged BTAM use only, early legislation states
Alternative team performing BTAM functions | 23 | 16 | 9
Sample (N = 423 | 481 | 842 by column) · State-policy groups in column order: other states, encouraged BTAM use only, early legislation states
No BTAM team | 4 | 6 | 1
Sample (N = 423 | 481 | 842 by column) · State-policy groups in column order: other states, encouraged BTAM use only, early legislation states
Supported by BTAM team external to school district | 11 | 9 | 8
“During this school year (2024–2025), does your school or school district have a behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) team or any other formal group of persons tasked with identifying and assessing students who might be at risk for violent or harmful behavior (toward themselves or others)?”
“Is the BTAM team(s) housed at the school or district level, or both?”
“Some schools are served by BTAM teams external to a school or district. These teams may be managed by a community organization; a local, county, state, or federal government entity; a law enforcement agency; or other organizations. Is your school served by an outside BTAM team?”
“Does your school have a school-based team that makes decisions regarding serious student behavioral concerns that is not referred to as a behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) team? This could be a team associated with a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) or positive behavioral intervention system (PBIS) that makes decisions about individualized interventions for serious behavioral concerns” (N = 1,746)
For principals who responded to the above items, “Don’t know,” we counted their school as a “no.”
One hundred boxes are used to represent the population of public schools in each state policy context.
Percentages and shading may not align or sum to 100 because of rounding.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
(none) | Total | 82 | 14 | 97
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School-level subgroups (elementary, middle, high)
Level | Elementary | 81 | 16 | 97
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School-level subgroups (elementary, middle, high)
Level | Middle | 86 | 11 | 97
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School-level subgroups (elementary, middle, high)
Level | High | 81 | 13 | 94
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School-locale subgroups (urban, suburban, rural)
Locale | Urban | 86 | 12 | 98
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School-locale subgroups (urban, suburban, rural)
Locale | Suburban | 84 | 13 | 97
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School-locale subgroups (urban, suburban, rural)
Locale | Rural | 78 | 17 | 95
Sample (column N undeterminable) · Neighborhood-poverty subgroups (high, middle, low)
Neighborhood poverty level | High | 80 | 16 | 96
Sample (column N undeterminable) · Neighborhood-poverty subgroups (high, middle, low)
Neighborhood poverty level | Middle | 82 | 14 | 96
Sample (column N undeterminable) · Neighborhood-poverty subgroups (high, middle, low)
Neighborhood poverty level | Low | 85 | 13 | 98
Sample (column N undeterminable) · Student racial/ethnic-composition subgroups
Student racial/ethnic composition | Majority White students | 82 | 15 | 97
Sample (column N undeterminable) · Student racial/ethnic-composition subgroups
Student racial/ethnic composition | Majority students of color | 82 | 14 | 97
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School enrollment-size subgroups (small, large)
Enrollment size | Small | 79 | 17 | 96
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School enrollment-size subgroups (small, large)
Enrollment size | Large | 85 | 12 | 97
“During this school year (2024–2025), does your school or school district have a behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) team or any other formal group of persons tasked with identifying and assessing students who might be at risk for violent or harmful behavior (toward themselves or others)?”
“Does your school have a school-based team that makes decisions regarding serious student behavioral concerns that is not referred to as a behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) team? This could be a team associated with a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) or positive behavioral intervention system (PBIS) that makes decisions about individualized interventions for serious behavioral concerns” (N = 1,746)
Bars may not sum to totals because of rounding.
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